The Case Against Annotation
Annotation is a great tool for teaching adolescents how to read closely. Educators often use it to train students to derive answers to comprehension questions from the text, not from their opinions or conjectures. “You say this character is depressed. Underline the phrases or sentences that tell us this,” a teacher may ask. Such practice is important for grounding students’ analyses in authors’ words. Nevertheless, sometimes it’s best to skip it.
The key to improving adolescent literacy is to get students to enjoy reading. A constant annotation practice can work against this goal. Yes, kids need to build close-reading skills, but they also need time to implement these skills in a free-form way. If students pick a book they’re excited about, at the right reading level, and then they’re required to annotate it, they may get bogged down in the work of annotation. They’ll lose the flow of the author’s words and the joy of the imagined world they’re inhabiting.
It’s crucial to make room for joyful reading. It’s also important to use annotation correctly. To maximize the impact of annotation, students must annotate texts that correspond with their comprehension abilities. When kids try to annotate content that’s way over their heads, the practice becomes an exercise in futility. Even worse, it builds bad habits, leading students to guess at answers and meanings instead of deriving them from the text.
If you’re teaching a single text to a classroom of readers who are on all different levels, and you want the students to annotate it, you should provide scaffolding so that the weaker readers can access it. Vocabulary is a common obstacle to comprehension. Because understanding a text requires knowing 90-95% of the words it contains, you should teach students the unfamiliar words they’ll need to know before they start reading a stretch text. Zinc’s vocabulary games have over 7,000 words to build from. And be sure that kids have the background knowledge they need to understand a text. Use Zinc’s articles to build that context. And then, get them annotating.